[89] This word must not be confounded with Nubian, a word which has come down from antiquity, and which, like the term Egypt, did not originally apply to the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.
[90] If this account of slave capture in the time of Mehemet Ali should appear incredible, I would refer the reader to a book that contains the narrative of an eye-witness: Pallme, ‘Travels in Kordofan,’ London, 1844.
[91] Under the most Christian-minded Popes of the eighth century, slave-markets and the slave-trade flourished unhindered, not only in Italy, but in Rome itself.
[92] I would refer especially to the district of Lagos, where the advance has been rapid to a degree hitherto unheard of in the history of the continent. In 1871 the entire commerce of the British possessions on the West Coast amounted to 2,556,000l., and may at the present time be estimated at 3,000,000 sterling.
[93] Detailed accounts appear in the ‘Zeitschrift für Allgem. Erdkunde.’ Vol. xviii. 1866.
[94] The long possession of almost sovereign rights enjoyed by European consuls in the East has given the people a confidence in their sense of justice, and would prevent them from fearing any encroachment on their religious opinions.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Tidings of war. Two months’ hunting. Yolo antelopes. Reed-rats. Habits of the Aulacodus. River oysters. Soliman’s arrival. Advancing season. Execution of a rebel. Return to Ghattas’s Seriba. Disgusting population. Allagabo. Alarm of fire. Strange evolutions of hartebeests. Nubian cattle raids. Traitors among the natives. Remains of Shol’s huts. Lepers and slaves. Ambiguous slave-trading. Down the Gazelle. The Balæniceps again. Dying hippopotamus. Invocation of saints. Disturbance at night. False alarm. Taken in tow. The Mudir’s camp. Crowded boats. Confiscation of slaves. Surprise in Fashoda. Slave caravans on the bank. Arrival in Khartoom. Telegram to Berlin. Seizure of my servants. Remonstrance with the Pasha. Mortality in the fever season. Tikkitikki’s death. Θάλαττα. θάλαττα.
The first boats had reached the Meshera early in the year, and the number of soldiers in the Seriba kept continually increasing by the arrival of fresh contingents from Khartoom. The firms of Ghattas and Kurshook Ali seemed both to have a sharp look-out for business, for one of them had collected forty and the other seventy-eight fresh idlers as recruits. Their arrival gave new life to the Seribas; friends and relatives who had not met for years exchanged greetings and recounted mutual experiences, whilst news from Khartoom was eagerly circulated and as eagerly received.
For myself there was a collection of little notes sent by a friend at Khartoom that could not do otherwise than excite my keenest interest. They were six months old, but not the less on that account did they stimulate my curiosity: in them I read, in sentences that were almost as crisp and brief as telegrams, of the startling events of the previous autumn. Naturally I turned to my letters from home, hoping to gather further particulars of the strange occurrences that had thus been partially unfolded, but I found that these letters had all been written a year ago, whilst peace still prevailed throughout Europe, and that they only referred to ordinary and commonplace topics. So incomplete, therefore, were the intimations that I received of all that had transpired since November 1869, that the events all remained an enigma to me which I could very imperfectly comprehend. It is true that I had come across slave-traders in the west who had recently arrived overland from Khartoom, and who had plenty to tell of what was going on in the Soudan, but not a syllable fell from their lips about the great war of the Franks, for who besides myself was interested in the least in the fall of the Emperor of the French, or who cared either to hear or to relate the victories of the Germans? Although when I visited Khartoom many months had elapsed since the fall of Magdala, yet near as it was to the seat of war, the intelligence of the Abyssinian campaign even then had scarcely reached the town.